Dr. Nicola Scafetta writes:
Anthony, I believe that you may be interested in my last published work.
This paper suggests that climate is characterized by oscillations that are predictable. These oscillations appear to be linked to planetary motion. A climate model capable of reproducing these oscillation would outperform traditional climate models to reconstruct climate oscillations. For example, a statistical comparison is made with the GISS model.
Here’s the abstract at Sciencedirect:
Empirical evidence for a celestial origin of the climate oscillations and its implications
Abstract: We investigate whether or not the decadal and multi-decadal climate oscillations have an astronomical origin. Several global surface temperature records since 1850 and records deduced from the orbits of the planets present very similar power spectra. Eleven frequencies with period between 5 and 100 years closely correspond in the two records. Among them, large climate oscillations with peak-to-trough amplitude of about 0.1 $^oC$ and 0.25 $^oC$, and periods of about 20 and 60 years, respectively, are synchronized to the orbital periods of Jupiter and Saturn. Schwabe and Hale solar cycles are also visible in the temperature records. A 9.1-year cycle is synchronized to the Moon’s orbital cycles. A phenomenological model based on these astronomical cycles can be used to well reconstruct the temperature oscillations since 1850 and to make partial forecasts for the 21$^{st}$ century. It is found that at least 60\% of the global warming observed since 1970 has been induced by the combined effect of the above natural climate oscillations. The partial forecast indicates that climate may stabilize or cool until 2030-2040. Possible physical mechanisms are qualitatively discussed with an emphasis on the phenomenon of collective synchronization of coupled oscillators.
A free preprint copy of the paper can be found here:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1005.4639 (PDF available in right sidebar)
Basil Copeland and I made some similar observations in the past, but we did not examine other planetary orbital periods. Basil also did a follow up guest post on the random walk nature of global temperature.
This paper opens up a lot of issues, like Barycentrism, which I have tried to avoid because they are so contentious. I ask that commenters keep the dialog respectful and on-topic please.
NOTE: Updated at 10PM PST to add Figure 12, plus some changes to the introductory text per the request of Dr. Scafetta. – Anthony
@ur momisugly Craig Goodrich June 4, 2010 at 6:05 pm
True. Tidal forces exist. However they are exceedingly small on the surface of the Sun, in the order of submillimeters if my memory serves me. Compared to the size and mass of the Sun, these effects are completely negligible.
@Craig Goodrich June 4, 2010 at 6:49 pm
Yes, but Svensmark is busy at CERN these days trying to establish a physical mechanism. As far as I understand him, he used correlations to assist him in establishing a hypothesis, but only experiments can confirm whether the assumed effects exist in the real world.
One would hope that these teams followed the example of Svensmark and not just used the assumed correlations as basis for assertions.
tallbloke says:
June 5, 2010 at 2:41 am
anna v says:
June 4, 2010 at 11:59 pm
The main and insurmountable problem is that the force of gravity is so weak that any synchronization takes millions and billions of years and not decades and centuries as are the time scales of climate that are being discussed.
What about the force which is 24 million billion (whatever the right number is for electromagnetism) times stronger than gravity.
Scafetta specifically includes that force in his hypothesis. Why are you ignoring it?
I am not ignoring it, I am saying that there is not enough energy density in the interstellar and interplanetary electro/magnetic fields to be able to affect anything directly in the sense of synchronization. In any case they would fall in the same category as gravity: too weak and not enough energy available to change anything in the decades and century one is observing the climate. In addition they are variable and not stable in long term as gravity wells are.
It is the energy that is missing, not the imagination.
Magnetic fields could play an amplification role, as in the Galactic Cosmic Rays hypothesis still to be demonstrated, changing albedo .
if i see the letters TSI exclusively used in connection to trying to prove or disprove the suns affect on climate on earth I think I’m going to scream
or at least i’ll continue to lose respect for those who try to prove or disprove it with them
oh, and that goes for the 11 year cycle too
Abdusamatov
http://www.giurfa.com/abdusamatov2.pdf
Charvatova
http://www.ann-geophys.net/18/399/2000/angeo-18-399-2000.pdf
Roger Sowell
June 5, 2010 at 4:26 am
Thanks for that web site.
jinki says:(June 4, 2010 at 5:36 pm)
“Meanwhile Hathaway has once again reviewed his SC24 prediction, now down to 65 SSN.”
Dr S has predicted this from the start (I think 70 was his max) but was opposed and overruled by Hathaway.
Exoplanets are almost never detected in the way you describe. I am not eve sure if it has happened much at all. Typically, exoplanets are detected when their orbit plane around the distant star intersects the Earth. In such cases, the exoplanet will sometimes ‘transit’ the star, causing a temporary, tiny dip in the starlight received here. By careful measurement of the amount of light received (the technique is known as photometry), the existense of an exoplanet can be deduced.
If you look at the solar system from hundreds of light years away, you will have a very hard time trying to detect the 8 planets by studying the orbital wobble of the Sun. It never moves more than ~1.1 solar diameters away from where it would be without any planets. The stars in the sky are so far away (the closest is ~4 light years distant) that they all appear as perfect point-like light sources, i,e, their diameters appear to be zero as seen from here. Now, move one of them 1.1 diameters in any direction (not just perpendicular to the line of sight), and consider how easy t would be to detect it. I am not saying it is impossible, just very, very hard.
tallbloke says:
June 4, 2010 at 4:34 pm
I agree. But then I have had the privilege of seeing a few demonstrations by Ulric Lyons of his theory which contains some parallel to Nicola’s.
The ensuing, relentless exasperation (mostly mine, because I saw how explosive this was to the climatologist fraternity before he did) at the time it takes to plug all the holes, that we all know will need to be waterproof before publication, as the entire establishment will go mental-nuts-doo-lalley when they see it, and the continuous admiration I have for his methodology, insight and mathematical powers only add to my mirth.
I have a little chuckle to myself when I see formerly respected scientists and others snorting “astrology”, “numerology”, “rev up your orreries” and such.
Ulric’s elegant, independently repeatable, predictive system is no stranger to ridicule. At least no-one gets killed for failing at weather prediction now-a-days. Not so in more “primitive” times when the planets were attributed signs such as hot, cold, windy, wet etc and the local seer could make or break an entire comunity.
He will have the last laugh however, as the system is eminently easy to explain, instantly graspable and intuitively remarkable. “Eureka” does not do credit to the back-of-the-neck hair-standing, goggle-eyed amazement and outright shock that people experience when he reveals the core of the theory with a few diagrams and some historical hindcasting. (Yes, I do know the differences between hypothesis, theory and correlation)
I feel he should have published a while back for two reasons; The climate “debate” (or lack thereof) has gone on too long and this theory completely, utterly and comprehensively destroys AGW (let alone all the other acronymodious junk) and; The fury directed at his work by the establishment would be deflected and defused by the mass of people, all too happy to puncture the pompous, who would help to plug the holes when they see how easy it is to prove the fundamental heart of the discovery.
I said to him 2 years ago that he should publish and tour the lecture circuits as he refined it. He is inclined to keep tweaking the periphery until it is ironclad.
Whichever, I am constantly amused by the invested.
We will all have a good laugh about this, sooner rather than later.
Kermit
June 5, 2010 at 5:07 am
Look through my previous posts. It is the energy available that is important. The energy coming from a synod of planets on the sun is tiny compared to the energies swirling around in the sun. The tides that are induced are tiny on the sun: size of millimeter when one sunspot can be much bigger than the earth. How could such tiny tides push around earth sized magnetic disturbances?
Now synchronization is another story.
I could entertain the idea that somehow over the billions of years the fluid motions of the sun may have been modulated by all the gravitational bodies going around it, in the same way that the moon ended up looking with the same face on the earth. In that case, planetary motions and sun energy swirlings could have a similar frequency analysis spectrum and be correlated, not because of causation in the present, but because they are two giant clocks that have become synchronous over untold millenia.
(This would for example account for the 11 year coincidence.)
But this is just a hypothesis. I believe we will have to wait through a century or two to get good data for a long enough time that a frequency analysis might come up with solid correlations. And also we have to wait for a verified solid model of the sun behavior as well as a better gauge of climate than global temperature, which is a cousin four times removed from the energy of the system.
The Milankovitch cycles are caused by gravitational/tidal interactions of the Moon, Sun, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn.
If one thinks of the energy it takes to change the orbit and tilt of the Earth, the energy in the climate system is just a tiny, tiny fraction of that.
The Milankovitch cycles operate on long time scales but a force like this will also have smaller timescale influences.
There are certainly cycles in the climate, one just needs to tie this all together to show how the mechanism/forces actually impact the climate. For example, if you slow-down the Pacific equatorial current, you will get more El Ninos and there will be a slight warming. If you slow-down the Atlantic Meridional Circulation slightly, you will get more sea ice and there will be a slight cooling. If you change the average cloudiness of the Earth …
The partial forecast indicates that climate may stabilize or cool until 2030-2040.
Piers Corbyn, who uses the sun and moon in his forecasting, also sees cooling coming:
Just how difficult would it be to do a correlation of these cyclic phenomena with the ice core data?
What happens around Maunder minimum time?
Is there a correlation with sunspot cycles since 1715?
How about the MWP (according to some, hypothetical; according to others, documented by archaeology)?
Given the ephemeris data from JPL, running SCMSS back 4000 or 5000 years should be relatively straightforward.
How does this periodic data fit with the known periodicities in the orbit of the Earth: the perihelion progression, the known variation in the axial tilt, the known variations in the eccentricity of the orbit, and so on?
Always remember: Semmelweis and Pasteur were fools until they were proven right.
And all Semmelweis had to go on was data.
That is a pretty strong Chi square to be random.
As Lief pointed out the measured affect of planets is next to zero. As wayne said climate science is in the unknown due to the interactions of AO, NAO, PDO, PNA, AAO, ENSO, currents, trade winds, etc. And as our current records are now coming up to some intergral standard thanks to funding speciallized Sats, we may begin to observe.
I wish this Co2 element all the best in supporting the genocidel motivations of so called GRENNIES and the power hungry profiteers. UMM what ever happened to helping the poor.
Steven Mosher
” People need to decide if they want to throw out the temperature record or use it. ”
If I go out into the ocean on a rubber raft and try to measure wave height I will get one result, if I try to measure wave height from an ocean liner I will certainly get a different result.
Both sets of measurements are likely to show the same period between waves.
The universe has a heart beat and celestial bodies vibrate to this tune, all at differing frequencies. This isn’t religion, or science. It’s both and inseparable. This is the elephant in the room of climate change. Tesla understood this concept of “resonance” and “the electric universe” and used it to develop the engines of progress which power our society to this day.
Sadly, the IPCC and “consensus science” continues to microscopically examine CO2 as a driving climate force, which is nothing more than the flea on the elephant’s ass. We are surrounded by miriad cycles of nature, which can reinforce and interfer with each other producing sometimes violent results, all while CO2 lumbers upward at a snail’s pace. Any student of signals and systems analysis knows a shallow ramp input function does not produce a cyclical or step output function.
Dr. Scafetta is onto the Rosetta Stone of climate change. It has always been planetary mechanics which drives our climate, and sediment proxies are replete with evidence to this fact. We would be wise to heed Dr. Scafetta’s findings.
“It is found that at least 60\% of the global warming observed since 1970 has been induced by the combined effect of the above natural climate oscillations.”
The problem of course, is the difference between the “observed” warming and the actual warming. Once you remove the effects of UHI, station siting and station dropout problems, not to mention general hanky panky with the data by Mann et al, it is probably close to 100% natural.
Dr. Gray provided a good rundown of the problems here: http://nzclimatescience.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=26&Itemid=1
That was before Climategate, of course.
Nikola:
Please consider putting together a scientific presentation of your work for youtube. The paper is a problem to read. I would be making assumptions just in order to understand your terminology and graphs. I really think you need to present something like this live.
-JDN
Leif Svalgaard seems always to assume that the TSI is the best measure of solar actity as far as climate is concerned.This is not so. On decadal and millenial time scales the solar magnetic field strength is a much better climate indicator as a measure of cloud cover via changes in the cosmic ray flux and also as an indicator of energy transfer via CMEs, solar flares etc. Whats more the 10Be record provides a handy proxy for measurement in the geological record and for correlation with climate data.
On longer time scales the TSI – Northern Hemisphere insolation influence is more obvious in the well documented Milankovitch cycles.
The change in solar angular momentum and the amount of solar torsion is easily conceptualised by looking at plots of the changing radius of curvature of the suns orbit about the barycenter.
It seems to me that too many people are looking for a single cause and effect for current warming on which to hitch their wagon. I would seem much more logical that there are many small effects from a wide variety of causes that in total cause us to see what we see. Small changes in one or more of them could have the effect of a minute change in the outcome. But how does one weigh the magnitude of any one change in a sea of infinite combinations of related causes and effects?
My Dad was a football (American style) coach and we would watch film together. I learned that the results of a particular play were dependent on a host of events. For instance, the runner was able to penetrate the defensive line because the two offensive blockers outperformed their counterparts and pushed them back therefore creating the hole that the runner ran through. So what was the actually cause for the success of that play? Was it the runner’s ability to see the hole and run through it before it closed or was it the fact that the hole was there for him to see in the first place? Or was it the fact that the coaching staff had designed a play in such a way for it to be successful and then called the play at that particular time in the game? Was there any contribution on the part of the defensive coach who may have had called a defensive configuration that was conducive for the play to work against them, not anticipating that play to be called against them at that particular point of the game? In the pre-game planning, did the fact that the individual abilities of certain players allow the coaches to create a plan for when that play would be used and against which particular defensive configuration would be most likely be deployed at that time? But then, each individual player must outplay his counterpart in conjunction with the sum of the success or failure of all his other teammates in their individual battles on that play. Now, add in the chance that a single player will make an unanticipated change in his assignment on that play and do something unexpected simply by his intuition. If he is right the outcome will be different than if he “guesses” wrong. If any one of these things were different, the outcome of the play would be different? Or would it?
I think it is the same with changes in climate. Where is the credit (or blame if you wish) to be placed for what actually happens? Is it in a simplistic cause and effect of one thing? Or is it spread throughout the entire scope of all the possible combinations of the physical characteristics of the universe we live in? Is it even possible to model what the results of changing one thing would be without knowing how that one change affects all the other infinite combinations?
Whew, I think I’ll just go to the beach and let y’all figure it out.
Mosher and Lubos posts sum up pretty well what to think of this paper.
If I’m not mistaken I believe that Rhoades Fairbridge forecasted a cooling and increased vulcanism in his barycenter theory. Components of our universe affect and cause changes to other components in ways I don’t believe we will ever totally understand. Look at the changes of our understanding of the laws of physics over the last 100 years. Are we so arrogant to think that we understand all the interactions and even the basic fabric of our universe?
noaaprogrammer says:
June 4, 2010 at 10:28 pm
“…and meanwhile NASA is again trying to sensationalize perhaps the weakest solar cycle in a hundred years: “…The sun is waking up from a deep slumber, and in the next few years we expect to see much higher levels of solar activity…
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2010/04jun_swef/
This paragraph from the NASA item seems rather strange? :-
“SDO (the Solar Dynamics Observatory) is the newest addition to NASA’s fleet. Just launched in February, it is able to photograph solar active regions with unprecedented spectral, temporal and spatial resolution. Researchers can now study eruptions in exquisite detail, raising hopes that they will learn how flares work and how to predict them. SDO also monitors the sun’s extreme UV output, which controls the response of Earth’s atmosphere to solar variability.”
Is this a hint about the Earth’s missing climate ‘solar switch’, or something else ???
With all of the possible correlations with various solar system orbits, I suspect that this exercise may be an attempt at using Fourier Analysis to fit an equation of earth’s past temperatures.
Carsten Arnholm, Norway said:
“Correlations are correlations.”
Hear, hear!
This is a curve fit exercise, and as Bob Tisdale pointed out, there are lots of better (more physically meaningful) ways to get good correlation with the instrument temperature record.
Dr. Scafetta would do well to avoid any analysis which is not based on physically reasonable cause-and-effect. Speculation about coupled planetary oscillations and Barycenters is just that… speculation. The entire effort strikes me as silly.